The Next Generation of Digital Books

Our Choice will change the way we read books. And quite possibly change the world. In this interactive app, Al Gore surveys the causes of global warming and presents groundbreaking insights and solutions already under study and underway that can help stop the unfolding disaster of global warming. Our Choice melds the vice president's narrative with photography, interactive graphics, animations, and more than an hour of engrossing documentary footage. A new, groundbreaking multi-touch interface allows you to experience that content seamlessly. Pick up and explore anything you see in the book; zoom out to the visual table of contents and quickly browse though the chapters; reach in and explore data-rich interactive graphics.

A Guided Tour of Our Choice

Al Gore demonstrates the groundbreaking features that make Our Choice the first full-length interactive book of its kind.

Stunning Photography

Our Choice includes more than 270 images by some of the world's
finest photographers and photojournalists. The photos reveal the
sources of global warming, survey where our energy comes from,
and show off how solutions to the climate crisis are coming into
focus. They are the visual backbone of the reading experience and
depict people and locales in every corner of the globe with
artfulness and unflinching clarity.

Photos

Audio Captions

Photos throughout the app feature original audio commentary by Al
Gore, describing his own experiences and perspectives, conveying
new information, and adding historical and social context to the
images.

Audio

Documentary Features

Our Choice contains 35 short movies that comprise more than an hour
of documentary footage. The videos include compelling introductions
to the roots of the climate crisis, historical footage, and
interviews with green pioneers such as food activist Michael Pollan
and atmospheric scientist Charles Keeling. In addition, 15 original
animations show how natural systems, energy technologies, and
proposed solutions work.

Videos

Interactive Maps

Zoom in and explore every image's location on an interactive map.
Our Choice visits every corner of the earth, revealing where
global warming pollution comes from, and where people are taking
action.

Maps

Interactive Graphics

Fifteen interactive graphics — from a multilayered history of oil
prices to a changeable demonstration of how a passive-solar home
works to a windmill powered by your own breath — bring static
information to life.

Infographics

Contents

Our Choice

Introduction

Our Choice is the result of the groundbreaking insights
offered by the participants in more than 30 intensive
"Solutions Summits" organized to construct strategies
for solving the climate crisis. This multimedia book is
meant to inspire readers to take action — as
individuals and as participants in the political process
— and meet the challenge that now confronts us.

Chapter 1

What Goes Up Must Come Down

The deterioration of our atmosphere is by far the most
serious manifestation of the worldwide ecological
crisis. It affects every part of the earth, and if it
is not quickly addressed, it has the potential to end
human civilization as we know it. For all its
complexity, however, its causes are breathtakingly
simple.

Chapter 2

Where Our Energy Comes From and Where It Goes

Accelerated development of low-CO2 substitutes
for energy production is urgently needed. The exciting
news about such sources of energy is that there is an
almost limitless amount available. Indeed, all of the oil,
coal, and natural gas in the world contain the same amount
of energy as the earth receives in only 50 days from the
sun.

Chapter 3

Electricity From the Sun

Once the world chooses to set ambitious goals for scaling
up solar-electricity development and commits to the investments
necessary to further improve the technologies involved, there
is no question that solar energy will provide a major
percentage of the world's electricity.

Chapter 4

Harvesting the Wind

Not only is wind the fastest-growing source of
renewable electricity, but it is the fastest-growing
source of any form of energy, surpassing the net
additional capacity from coal-fired, gas-fired, and
nuclear power plants combined. Wind energy's
widespread availability is a main reason it has
become the world's most popular new source of
electricity.

Chapter 5

Soaking Up Geothermal Energy

MIT estimates that the "technically extractable portion"
of the U.S. geothermal resource is "about 2,000 times
the annual consumption of primary energy in the United
States." Indeed, geothermal sources could provide a
significant fraction of U.S. primary energy needs in a
sustainable manner for electricity generation and for
the heating and cooling of buildings.

Chapter 6

Growing Fuel

Because of the energy consumed in transforming plant
material into a usable form of power, the benefits of
biomass energy often still outweigh the costs, but full
"life cycle" analyses may soon determine which approaches
are truly beneficial in solving the climate crisis.

Chapter 7

Carbon Capture and Sequestration

All the technologies for capturing, compressing,
transporting, and sequestering CO2
emissions have been developed and tested on a small
scale. All of them work. But the components have yet
to be integrated and implemented on a large scale.
Changing this situation constitutes one of
civilization's main challenges for solving the
climate crisis.

Chapter 8

The Nuclear Option

In the world's debate over how to produce electricity
without generating massive quantities of greenhouse
gas pollution, there is a radioactive white elephant
in the room: nuclear power, an energy source in
crisis for the last 30 years. Can the obstacles to the
once hoped-for expansion of nuclear power be overcome?

Chapter 9

Forests

Deforestation has a double impact on the climate: first,
most of the carbon contained in the trees is emitted
into the atmosphere; and second, the planet loses part
of its ability to reabsorb CO2. The good news
is that governments are making efforts to sharply reduce
deforestation — though the key to success will be
addressing its underlying causes.

Chapter 10

Soil

By changing our land use patterns, we can not only reduce
emissions of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide,
but we can also pull a significant percentage of the
CO2 in the atmosphere into the soils, where
much of it can be sequestered for hundreds or even
thousands of years.

Chapter 11

Population

The world's effort to stabilize population growth —
a crucial factor in solving the climate crisis — is
a historic success story, albeit in slow motion. Indeed,
the question of how to stabilize population is, by and
large, one of the rare questions around which there is a
global consensus. Now we must capitalize on this emerging
success.

Chapter 12

Less is More

Improvements in the efficiency with which we use energy
are far and away the most cost-effective among the
solutions to the climate crisis and can be implemented
quickly. The opportunities for enormous gains can be
found in every sector of the economy—industrial
processing, residential and commercial buildings,
transportation, even in the design of cities themselves.

Chapter 13

The Super Grid

Improving electricity-delivery systems by constructing
continent-wide unified smart grids — or super grids
— will significantly reduce the huge emissions of
global warming pollution caused by inefficiencies and
failures in the transmission, distribution, and storage
of energy. The technologies necessary to build a super
grid are all fully developed and available now.

Chapter 14

Changing the Way We Think

Global warming has been described as the greatest market failure
in history. It is also the biggest failure of democratic
governance in history. In searching for the underlying reasons
for this, psychologists and neuroscientists have begun to argue
that the climate crisis poses an unprecedented challenge to our
ability to use reason as a basis for urgent response.

Chapter 15

The True Cost of Carbon

Carbon dioxide, the most important source of global warming
pollution, is invisible, tasteless, and odorless. It is
largely invisible to market calculations as well. And when
something's not recognized in the marketplace, it's easier
for government and business to pretend it doesn't exist.
That's got to change.

Chapter 16

Political Obstacles

John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped, "Politics is not the art
of the possible; it is the art of choosing between the disastrous
and the unpalatable." In the case of the climate crisis, our
choice has been clouded by confusion, generated in large part by
a massive political campaign of intentional deception on the part
of many corporate carbon polluters.

Chapter 17

The Power of Information

Now that we are faced with the unprecedented challenge of rapidly
improving our understanding of the earth's ecological system and
our place in it, it is time to focus on how we can make the
fullest and most creative use of information technology to help us.

Chapter 18

Our Choice

Not too many years from now, a new generation will look back at us
and pose one of two questions. Either they will ask, "Did you hear
the warnings and just not care?" Or they will ask instead, "How did
you find the moral courage to rise up and solve a seemingly
unsolvable crisis?" We must choose which of these questions we want
to answer, and we must give our answer now.

Two Years in the Making

In the five years since the publication and release of the landmark
book and film An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has convened more than
30 Solutions Summits around the world, bringing together some of the
most acclaimed and forward-thinking experts in renewable energy,
conservation, business, and governance in order to find actionable
solutions to the environmental. Our Choice presents that incredible
body of research, augmented by a revolutionary interface, fresh new
content, animations, video, and interactive infographics.